Nvidia Powers Amazon's New Cloud-based GPU Super Computing Service

With more than a little help from Nvidia, Amazon hopes to bring supercomputing to the masses through a new Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) offering called "Cluster GPU Instances."

By "masses," we're referring to enterprises and start-ups, not everyday Joes looking to run Crysis or improve their Folding@Home score (go Team 11108). Amazon's new Cluster GPU Instance is a server with two quad-core Intel Xeon X5570 processors, two Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs (Fermi), 22GB of memory, 1.7TB of storage, and a 10Gb/s Ethernet connection, Amazon's Jeff Barr said.

"With Amazon Cluster GPU Instances, our customers now have the power of high performance computing, the efficiency and speed of GPUs, and the highly scalable and affordable cloud environment our customers have come to expect fro Amazon Web Services (AWS)," said Peter De Santis, GM of Amazon EC2. "We're excited to help our customers access the raw power of GPU technology and look forward to the innovation this will enable."

Using all that GPU power can be tricky, but Nvidia says hundreds of applications have already been ported to the Nvidia CUDA architecture, making it easy for programmers to dive right in.